Naturalism cannot account for all of the parts necessary for life coming together at one time. Only an instantaneous creation and assembly of all of the necessary parts into a functioning unit can produce life. This is the basis of Intelligent Design. Anyone who would seriously consider this must admit that the Intelligent Designer used miraculous methods to do this!
The Bible teaches that God created everything from nothing, ex nihilo, with the appearance of age. Adam, the trees in the Garden of Eden, the rays of sunlight that warmed the garden, all evidently appeared mature, though they were all brand new. Is God a Deceiver by creating things that look old when they are not? No, he did not leave us in the dark or try to “trick us” or “test our faith”. God told us what he did!
Selections from The Case for the Mature Creation Hypothesis, by Jerry Bergman.
(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 48, Number 3, Winter 2012)
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Irrefutable Evidence for Intelligent Design
Naturalism simply cannot explain life. Consider that DNA is useless without: (1) all of the complex machinery required to produce
mRNA, such as RNA polymerase, and (2) the machinery required to translate the mRNA code into protein such as a
ribosome. Furthermore, a ribosome is only one of multiple proteins that the cellular machinery produces from mRNA.
Hundreds of complex proteins are necessary for a cell to be alive and, therefore, a functional cell could have been created only as a complete functioning unit, not as individual parts. Also, most nucleotides rapidly degrade at the temperatures that scientists speculate existed on the early earth (Irion, 1998).
Evolution cannot account for all of the parts necessary for life coming together at one time and being properly assembled and activated as a unit in a timely manner so that it will produce life.
Products produced by the nonliving world (such as smooth stones polished by moving water) could never produce either plant or animal life because all life is based on enormous amounts of information, and the parts produced by that information must be assembled according to a designed plan in an environment, such as a certain ecosystem, that supports life (Schroeder, 2001; Yockey, 1992; Behe, 1996)
Furthermore,
the earth is a system involving many complex feedback cycles. A well-known example is that the earth must have an oxygen cycle, a carbon cycle, a nitrogen cycle, a sulfur cycle, a hydrologic cycle, and numerous other interconnected cycles in order to sustain life on the planet. The earth must have been created with all of its cycle systems functioning to allow life to be able to live on it.
The Intelligent Designer at Work
Since evolution cannot explain this problem, and it has been documented that this approach is not feasible,
only an instantaneous creation and assembly of all of the necessary parts into a functioning unit can produce life.
If creation has occurred at all, it is reasonable that it would have been a complete creation. It must have had an “appearance of age” at the moment of creation. This Creation must have included all the chemical elements already organized in all the organic and inorganic chemical compounds and mixtures necessary to support the processes of the earth and of life on the earth (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, pp. 344-345, 369).
Eighteenth-century naturalist Philip Gosse argued that since both living and nonliving things existed in never-ending cycles,
the Intelligent Designer created everything in the act of progressing in its cycle—egg to chicken, chicken to egg, oak to acorn, then to oak, and again to acorn in an endless cycle. Life would reproduce and develop, with animals having skin, blood, and bones when created, all making them appear to someone who falsely assumes that all current processes must be extrapolated into the past older than they actually were when created. This theory he called
prochronism, or “outside of time” (Gosse, 1857).
Nobel laureate George Wald even stated that he believed
the universe was designed for life. As an example, he stated that the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen “have unique properties” required for life that are not shared by any other element in the periodic table of the elements (interview in Levy, 1998, p. 12).
Creation from Nothing
Plato and other ancient sages believed that God created the universe from preexisting chaos (Hannam, 2009, p. 63). In contrast,
Christianity taught that God created the universe from nothing, thus the creation was not a remake of something old, but rather was the creation of
something that was new and
that Genesis says
was “very good.” This is important for the doctrines of the Fall of mankind into sin and death described in Genesis and Jesus’ sacrifice to restore humankind (Hannam, 2009, p. 41).
Ex-nihilo creation from nothing always
results in all created objects having
the appearance of maturity. This conclusion applies to all miracles, including everything from the creation of wine from water to the creation of Adam and Eve from dust.
The idea of mature creation may account for the discrepancy between the age that scientists have determined for various aspects of creation and the age that Genesis presents.
The problems inherent in dating an instantaneous, supernatural creation are illustrated by the creation of the first man, Adam. If a
modern onlooker assumed that Adam was born an infant as are modern humans, he
would conclude that Adam was about 20 years old when, in fact, he was only about one day old. This does not imply that the Creator is deceptive but reflects the fact that the human body had to be created fully formed and functional in order to exist as a living organism.
If Adam’s blood were not already circulating in his circulatory system when he was created, the few minutes required to prime his circulation system could cause major cell death or damage. Furthermore, all of Adam’s organs—including his heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, etc. — must have been functioning simultaneously as a unit the instant that he was created. In other words, Adam must have been created as a fully mature young man.
For this reason, even though Adam was created instantaneously, he would be evaluated by many modern physiological measurements to be a 20-year old man the moment he was created (Poythress, 2006). An example is bone ossification measurements that evaluate the level of conversion of cartilage into bone as the child develops. A physician might conclude from bone-to-cartilage ratios, that Adam was 20 years old, some evidence for an age much less than 20 might also be found. We might not detect certain effects of aging (such as DNA and RNA damage) in a one-day-old Adam. Likewise, lack of both tooth wear, cosmic ray damage, and other signs of aging may also have indicated an age of a few days old instead of 20 years old.
Kyle Butt asks, "How old were Adam and Eve two seconds after God created them? They were literally two seconds old! Yet they walked, talked, and looked like adult human beings, and even had the ability to reproduce" (Butt, 2002, p. 40-R).
We know that
the Garden of Eden appeared old because it had fully grown trees with fruit on them when created.
The earth, solar system, Milky Way Galaxy, and entire universe were brought into existence supernaturally during six 24-hour days. Top soil and trees appeared virtually instantaneously in the Garden. Fully-grown animals were miraculously formed on land and in the air, complete with symbiotic relationships. The seas instantly swarmed with creatures, great and small, that had never been born or developed from infancy. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were adults from their first breaths. The sun’s nuclear fusion furnace began on Day 4, at full power and in thermodynamic equilibrium. Starlight from distant stars was created in transit, complete with a virtual history of information embedded within the light waves. Adam and Eve could look at the night sky their first evening on Earth and see cosmic light sources much as we do tonight. To an observer the completed creation on Day 6 was fully functioning in a steady state (DeYoung, 2010, p. 54).
The sun must have been able to heat and light the earth on the day it was created. Although it takes only eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth, it takes an estimated 10,000 to 170,000 years for the gamma rays produced in the sun’s core to reach the sun’s surface as visible photons due to the absorption and reemission path taken as the photons journey outwards (Sturrock, 1985). The photons must have been created in transit as if millions of years had passed.
As God created the universe for a reason it is not unreasonable to infer that the stars were created with their light in transit (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p. 369). Although other theories exist to explain the fact that we can see stars that are millions of light years away, such as Russell Humphrey’s white hole cosmology (Humphreys, 1994), the mature creation view can effectively explain how distant supernovae can be seen from the earth within a Biblical time framework.
Interesting questions remain. Did Adam had a navel? (Since he was not born of a woman.) Did the first trees have rings? (The trees would have been fully grown, and fruit trees would have fruit on them, giving the appearance of age). Would ground erosion be evident at the time of Adam, aside from that caused by newly created rivers, a moment after they were created?
Miracles
Creation ex nihilo is not a natural process. Rather it
is a miracle.
Arguably the “most spectacular of Jesus’ miracles” was the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Mary and Martha (Sanders, 1962, p. 103). Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead after Lazarus had been in the grave for four days, long enough for his body to begin major levels of decomposition. It is for this reason that the scriptural account describes his body as having a strong, unpleasant smell.
Others Jesus raised from the dead had only recently died (namely, Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5:22–43 and the son of the widow at Nain in Luke 7:11–17), and some argue that they were only in a coma from which they were revived.
But no such argument can be made in the case of Lazarus. When a body smells, it means that the stomach acids have begun to hydrolyze the body’s internal tissues and that the intestinal bacteria has begun digest connective tissue and other body carbohydrates. However, writing books arguing that Lazarus’s resurrection was medically impossible does not prove that the event did not occur, only that it was a miracle.
Another example of a miracle is
Christ’s conversion of water into wine (John 2:7–11). Scientifically, this is impossible because water contains hydrogen and oxygen in a two to one ratio. Wine contains water, plus a carbon based compound called ethyl alcohol or ethanol, and various flavors and other components. Jesus performed a natural process instantaneously, not in a year or so as is normally required to produce wine from
grapes using water.
As it is a “strain to fit the history of the world into a biblical 6,000 years” (Gardiner, 2009, p. 132), it is also a strain to convert water into wine in a few seconds, or to turn back the clock on a dead man. If these events actually occurred, as the Bible and Christians have believed for 2,000 years, all these events are miracles.
Is God a Deceiver?
A major objection to the appearance-of-age theory is that if God made the earth appear older than it actually is, then He has deceived us because the earth is not, in fact, as old as it appears.
Kyle Butt concludes that the deception claim would be valid except that:
God told us what he did! He did not leave us in the dark or try to “trick us” or “test our faith” by hiding from us important information that He knew we would need. Rather, He was very straightforward and honest with us. Considering the material found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis (and elsewhere throughout the Bible), no one can justifiably accuse God of deception (Butt, 2002, p. 40-R).
Conversely, John Morris adds that if “scientists extrapolating present process are right and the universe is old, then God has lied to us, for He clearly said He created all things in six days, not too long ago” (Morris, 2010, p. 15).
Appearance of Age, Evolutionists, and the Culture Wars
One evolutionist Professor, John Wagner
has noticed the difficulty in teaching evolution in the classroom to students with a religious veiwpoint. He wrote:
Most undergraduate students take geology courses as the perceived least painful option to fulfill their institution’s general education laboratory science requirements … Many of these students, especially in large state-assisted schools … bring religious viewpoints and perspectives to their studies which espouse profoundly negative views about evolution and the geologic time scale. Students in this category will grudgingly memorize the minimum amount of geological information they need to pass the course, but will let the instructor know that they don’t believe a word of it is true. This type of situation doesn’t help the student, the class morale, or the greater goal of scientific literacy for all people (Wagner, 2005, p. 194).
The solution that he found very successful in both physical and historical geology classes is:
to introduce the concept of apparent age prior to discussing the geological time scale or the age of the earth in the lecture setting. By acknowledging up front that special creation is a possible option, so long that creation carries the imprint of apparent age, the tension among students is relieved and geological processes and concepts can be investigated in good conscience based on the apparent age of rocks, fossils, or landscapes. With students no longer on the defensive, they are free to study geology without feeling like they are betraying their religious faith (Wagner, 2005, p. 194).
The evidence given here should cause all evolutionists to consider, as Wagner does, that special creation is viable!
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References (selected)
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Darwin’s Black Box. Free Press, New York, NY.
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